Where the Light Fell: An Interview with Philip Yancey

Where the Light Fell, A Memoir by Philip Yancey

In his latest book, a memoir, Where the Light Fell, Yancey shares with his readers vulnerable, often painful stories, of his years growing up in a religiously fundamentalist home and church in Georgia. Rife with racism, legalism, and attitudes of anti-science, his experiences living in the South during the civil-rights movement demonstrate the power of grace and healing that only Christ can bring to the broken places in our lives.

Recently, I had the opportunity to ask Philip more about his life as a boy growing up in the South. He touches upon his views of science, church life, and offers hope for Christians who are deconstructing.

Kendra: I recently read your memoir, Where the Light Fell. A good portion of the book is dedicated to your early childhood, adolescence, and teenage years. Many of those years are riddled with adversity and hardship, and yet it seems you find moments of grace in the midst of those trials. What were some of those portals of grace that showed up in your life? 

Philip: “Portals of grace”—I like that! The title of my memoir comes from a phrase by St. Augustine, who said he could not look at the sun directly but looked on where the light fell until he could follow those rays back up to the sun. I, too, could not look at the sun directly—I had been scorched by a strict religious environment that misrepresented God as a kind of bully, enforcing rules of behavior with a scowl. I tell of three places where the light fell for me: the beauties of nature, classical music, and romantic love.

As I experienced the softer side of God, especially in what I learned from Jesus, I wanted at last to know the One responsible for so much goodness. G. K. Chesterton used to say, “The worst moment for an atheist is when he feels a deep sense of gratitude and has no one to thank.” That’s the condition in which I found myself…until God found me.

Kendra: You write about those early years at home, “Church defines my life. Our family attends services every Sunday morning and evening and also on Wednesday nights for prayer meeting. Plus, I’m expected to show up for Vacation Bible School, youth activities, ‘revivals’ and whenever else the doors open. The church tells me what to believe, whom to trust and distrust, and how to behave.” How did these rules impact you and your growing faith in Christ as a young person?

I’ve written two dozen books, and as the memoir shows, all of them are my attempts to revisit the words I learned as a child and locate the authentic kernel of truth. If Jesus is not the Sunday School version, what is he, really? Hence, The Jesus I Never Knew. If prayer does not follow a predictable vending-machine pattern, does it make any difference at all? And What’s So Amazing About Grace?—many of my books circle back to the questions I wrestled with while “in recovery” from a church that got some things right and some things badly wrong.

Kendra: Many people with a similar background have deconstructed their beliefs and left Christianity entirely. How is it that you emerged into adulthood with your faith intact? 

Philip: I can’t take credit for that. God granted me a decisive conversion experience that changed everything, literally overnight. I’ve always hesitated to give the details, which I now tell in the memoir, because God meets us in different ways, and I’m not setting out a model for others. I also had the example of an older brother who not only deconstructed but demolished his belief. He made many self-destructive choices in the process. I now see that he amputated whatever part of his past he didn’t like, whereas I tried to stitch together the mistakes and “grace notes” into some kind of pattern.

I like the progression Richard Rohr describes as Order/Disorder/Reorder. I grew up in a highly ordered, fundamentalist environment. I suspended faith for a time, the disorder phase. In my twenties, I was blessed to find a father figure in Dr. Paul Brand. (My father died when I was a baby, the victim of a failed attempt at faith healing.) Dr. Brand was a wise and saintly doctor/scientist with whom I collaborated on three books, especially Fearfully and Wonderfully. That offered me a cocoon period when my own faith could take shape—reorder—while I wrote with integrity about his. As I put words to his faith, he imparted faith to my words.

Kendra: You became interested in science in high school, but your mother warned you about your teachers, saying, “Be careful…they’ll tell you stuff about evolution and dinosaurs that contradict the Bible”(p. 80). Can you tell me more about how science was viewed in your home and within your church? How did these attitudes influence your view of science at that time? How did your views shift when you went to work in a laboratory at the CDC?

I tell the story of how on my first day at the CDC, when I was assigned to work with a Ph.D. in biochemistry who happened to be a Black man, I was forced to confront the fact that my fundamentalist church had lied to me about race. And if they were wrong about race, what about Jesus and the Bible? Churches need to be very careful when they speak dogmatically. By scaring kids away from science, they set them up for a rude awakening. Many go away to universities and learn incontestable facts about an old universe and the fossil record and, likewise, begin to doubt everything in the faith they have been taught.